


you'd better stop and rebuild all your ruins

by xylodemon



Series: deancas codas: season ten [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, M/M, Mark of Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 17:01:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2659646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xylodemon/pseuds/xylodemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean doesn't think about taking the third shot. Or the fourth. Or any of the shots that come after. He doesn't realize he has unloaded the rest of the clip into Olivia's corpse until the gun is empty and the kitchen is quiet and Sam is staring at him like he has two heads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you'd better stop and rebuild all your ruins

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for 10x06. Dialogue from the second section taken directly from the show, no copyright infringement intended, etc, etc.
> 
> Warnings for canon-typical violence in relation to the Mark of Cain.

Dean's first shot brings Olivia down, but it's too dark in the kitchen to see where the bullet hits. 

His second shot is a fail-safe. His demon vacation had him up on blocks so long he isn't sure he still trusts his aim, and he wouldn't put it past a shifter to try and play possum, even with the kind of hunters who know better. Shifters can survive one silver bullet if it misses the heart, if they can slip their skin before their body gets too poisoned.

He doesn't think about taking the third shot. Or the fourth. Or any of the shots that come after. He doesn't realize he has unloaded the rest of the clip into Olivia's corpse until the gun is empty and the kitchen is quiet and Sam is staring at him like he has two heads.

The spent shells make thin, hollow sounds as they roll across the expensive floor.

 

+

 

They leave the LaCroix place pretty late, but Dean heads straight for the interstate, wants to put as many miles between himself and that crazy family and their funhouse mansion has he can manage. Rich people have always given him the heebs, and shifters -- Christ. Just thinking about Olivia makes something vague and uncomfortable itch beneath his skin.

The rain picks up as they near the outskirts of New Canaan, just enough to make the asphalt slick and to brighten the flare of oncoming headlights. Sam is restless in the passenger seat, jerking his leg up and down and drumming his fingers on the door panel, and it gets so bad that Dean almost tells him to just spit it out. He has never been a big fan of talking, but sometimes it's easier that way, to pull the scab off all at once instead of letting Sam pick at it for the next five hundred miles.

"Dean," he says finally, his voice too quiet. "What was that back there?"

"What are you talking about?"

Sam hesitates for a second, road-shadows dancing across his face. "Okay -- all those extra shots after the shifter was already dead."

"I don't know," Dean says. He can still see Olivia sprawled at his feet -- the dull shimmer of her hair, the blood pooling under her back, the unnatural angle of her arm. "Target practice?"

"Come on, man. I'm serious." Sam shifts in his seat and the leather gives a tired creak. "You sure it wasn't demon residue or something to do with the Mark?"

Dean shakes his head, swallows the sour taste in the back of his throat. "No. None of that."

"Look, man. I've got to be honest with you -- "

"Oh my god, Sammy," Dean says, his hands white-knuckled on the wheel. "It was my first kill since I've been... back. You know, I -- I got a little anxious. I wanted to make sure it was done right, plain and simple."

Rain patters against the Impala's roof. Sam opens his mouth, but Dean just shrugs him off.

"Why am I even explaining this to you?" he mutters, reaching for the radio.

 

+

 

They stop for the night in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. It's only three hundred miles from New Canaan, but it's three states away, and that's about as far as they're going to get without Dean sleep-driving the Impala into a ditch. The last vacancy in town is at a place called Woods Inn off US 322; it's a long line of squat bungalows that all look like the kind of log cabin Daniel Boone was born in, and the manager is less than thrilled when he checks them in, probably because it's almost two in the morning.

The room has horse blankets on the beds and a stuffed deer head over the door. Dean dumps his bag on the floor and walks right back outside; he needs a drink, and the cheap beer in the cooler isn't going to cut it.

He gets about ten yards from the Kwik-Stop across the street before he remembers that Pennsylvania's liquor laws are fucked. He stands in the parking lot for a couple of minutes, stamping his feet against the cold as his breath takes shape in front of his face, then goes inside and buys some cupcakes and a couple of Slim Jims and a copy of every newspaper they carry.

 

+

 

Sam falls asleep watching _Three's Company_ with the volume down low, his face buried in his pillow and one of his gigantic clown feet hanging off the edge of the bed.

Once he's snoring, Dean pours himself a double from the bottle of garbage, no-brand whiskey he keeps in the Impala's trunk for medical emergencies, and he shuffles through the newspapers looking for anything that might go bump in the night.

 

+

 

Dean hadn't been kidding when he called Murphy a douche; he doesn't find anything suspicious in the papers he bought and he doesn't hear anything suspicious on the morning news.

"I told you," Sam says, buttoning one of his ugly plaid shirts in the bathroom doorway. "There's nothing spooky going on right now."

They have a Kwik-Stop breakfast because the pancake house off I-80 has a line halfway down the block. Dean is too jittery for something like that anyway; he's anxious to get back on the road, doesn't want to sit down and smile at the waitress and drink his coffee six ounces at a time. Sam's cell rings as they're walking out to the car, and Dean eats a shitty sausage and egg burrito while leaning against the Impala and listening to the Sam side of a hunting conversation.

He runs out of coffee as Sam says, "Yeah, we'll check it out. Are you sure you're -- yeah, okay. Just -- you can always call us, you know that, right?" Dean goes back into the Kwik-Stop for a refill and another shitty burrito; when he comes back out, Sam is sitting on the Impala's trunk and munching on one of those twigs-and-berries granola bars.

"Was that Krissy?" Dean asks. She's pretty much the only person Sam soft-talks on the phone, except maybe Jody Mills. 

Sam nods, swallowing a mouthful of granola. "Yeah. She wanted to know if we'd roll on a couple of weirdo deaths in Arkansas."

"I thought you said nothing spooky was going on."

"The last one was a month ago," Sam says, frowning as the wind whips his hair in front of his face. "A month ago we were still up in Washington with Kate."

"What about the other one?"

"Two months ago. Batesville sounds familiar... I think I read about that one on the internet. But that was -- you know. I was -- "

"Right, yeah. You were busy dealing with me." Dean sips his new coffee, which is still so hot it burns his tongue and stings the back of his throat. "This once a month shit sounds like werewolves."

"That's what Krissy thought."

"They doing all right?"

"Yeah, they're fine," Sam says, popping the last of the granola bar into his mouth. He slides to his feet and tosses the wrapper in the dumpster waiting at the Impala's nose. "I guess they were down there working this thing, but they crashed their van into a telephone pole."

"Anyone hurt?"

"No, but there were a couple of witnesses, so they decided to skip town in case someone called the cops. Aiden is still underage."

Dean unwraps his second burrito and stares at it for a second, then crumples the foil back over it and chucks it at the dumpster. It hits the rusty side and flops straight to the ground, landing right next to the wheel; Dean just shrugs and turns back to the car. "Okay." He hates the idea of those three working jobs, but they've made it clear that nothing he and Sam say will make them hang up their spurs. "The kids are all right, and we've got work to do again. Let's go."

 

+

 

It is a werewolf -- not the Kate or Garth kind, but the Madison kind, completely feral during the full moon and responsible for at least five deaths.

Sam has the first clear shot at her, but he misses by a mile because they chased the her into an abandoned house, and he fires while tripping over what's left of the dining room table. She corners Dean against a closed door and grabs him by the throat, her claws digging into the soft skin underneath Dean's jaw. Dean knees her in the stomach, which probably doesn't hurt all that much, but it does make enough room for Dean to get the muzzle of his gun against her chest.

He empties the whole clip into her, pulls the trigger another seven or eight times before he realizes there's nothing left.

 

+

 

They swing north toward the bunker up US 167, stopping in West Plains, Missouri long enough to eat and catch a case.

"So get this," Sam says, hunching his shoulders as he wrestles with a fish taco. His shirt is the same olive-green as the sticky counter top. "The abandoned firehouse on the edge of town might be haunted."

Dean grunts around a mouthful of carne asada. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. When I was in line for the head, I overheard the kids in front of me talking about it. A couple of nights ago, they broke in looking for a place to drink and got chased out by a white figure holding a fireman's axe."

 

+

 

Two hours and a trip to the library later, they come up with a decent suspect -- Roger Hamilton, who had been the assistant fire chief back in the forties. He was canned and jailed for taking bribes to cover up insurance fraud arsons, but he went to his grave insisting he'd been framed.

After dark, they head out to the old firehouse and poke around the rubble and rats until Hamilton pops in to toss them around a little, then drive across town to the city cemetery and dig up his grave.

Sam pours the salt and Dean pours the lighter fluid. He drops a flaming book of matches on the body, watches it burn feeling anxious and unsettled, almost dissatisfied.

 

+

 

South of Kansas City, Dean stays on US 71 instead of curving west onto I-435. Leavenworth might be ugly as fuck, but anything is better than driving through Lawrence.

They eat an early dinner at the Biggerson's in Atchison; on their way out, they get cornered by a vampire in the service alley. It's kind of a bonehead move, but bloodsuckers tend to be more hunger than brains. This one is a straggler from a nest Dean and Sam cleared out a couple of years ago, and vampires don't do so well on their own, can go off the rails without a sense of family to keep them grounded.

Neither of them have a machete, and the vamp is canny enough to keep himself between whoever is closest at the moment and the car. In the end, Dean takes his head off with his boot knife, and there's blood everywhere by the time he's done, most of it on Dean's face and hands and down the front of his shirt.

He rinses himself off at the spigot beside Biggerson's dumpster, watches how the water runs red after it hits his hands, fading as it splashes onto the dirty concrete and gurgles down the drain.

 

+

 

Cas is waiting for them when they pull up outside the bunker. It's the middle of the night, and there aren't any streetlights in the area, so at first Dean only sees the tan shape of his coat and the white vee of the shirt underneath it, barely lighter than the shadows around them. Once his eyes adjust he sees Cas' face, and the vines climbing down the retaining wall to brush his shoulder, and the boxy shape of the Continental, parked another yard or two down the frontage road.

Dean just stares at him while he waits for Sam to open the garage door, something hot and tight twisting in his chest, his mouth dry when he tries to swallow, sour like his heart has crawled up into the back of his throat. He also feels a little embarrassed, because Sam -- fucking Sam. Dean knows that Sam knows -- in fact, he's pretty sure that Sam has _always_ known -- but since their tangle with Calliope it has been tougher for them to keep pretending he doesn't. He even tried to talk about it on the drive home, when they'd been about two hours outside of Lebanon, with nothing to look at but the boring Nebraska prairie. Dean had shut him down hard and fast, but he figures it's only a matter of time before he brings it up again.

Eventually, Cas comes over to the car and leans through the window, his folded arms resting on the door. Dean wants to kiss the corner of his jaw, touch his fingers to the dip of his throat, right in the shadow of his open collar. It would be easier if he hadn't been allowed to do that once, if he didn't -- if he just _didn't_. His trip to Rexford is one of the many things he likes to keep buried under denial and Jim Bean, but it's difficult to do when Cas is actually around.

That's the part that's truly embarrassing, the part he really doesn't want Sam to know: not that he loves Cas, or even that he once let Cas fuck him in a cheap motel in the south of Idaho, but that for once in his life he finally got what he wanted but was only able to keep ahold of it for a handful of hours. From a little after eleven until Cas' shift started at six. Dean had driven back from Rexford filled with something close to hope, half-convinced that things might actually work out for him this time, that maybe once Sam was healed and "Ezekiel" was gone he could bring Cas back to the bunker -- bring Cas _home_.

"It's good to see you, man," Dean says, because -- in spite of himself -- it is. "I didn't know you were planning to come out this way."

"I wasn't," Cas says, his voice quiet and rough. "I'm here because your brother called me."

 

+

 

"There's nothing wrong with me," Dean snaps. They're in the garage, and his voice ricochets off all that concrete and stainless steel like a gunshot. "How many times do I gotta tell you?"

"Dean -- "

"Look, Sammy, I get it. You're worried, and I don't blame you for that, but I'm not -- I'm fine."

"How do you feel?" Cas asks quietly. It's the first thing he has said in twenty minutes, since he announced that he'd only come because Sam called him. "Are you angry?"

"What? I -- no." 

Cas narrows his eyes. "Dean."

"No," Dean says again, the word buzzing in the back of his throat, as restless as a live wire. Cas and Sam just stare at him for a moment, the same incredulous look pasted on their faces, and Dean ducks through Baby's window to grab a beer from the cooler in the backseat. He fucking needs it. "I mean, yeah. Sometimes. But it's... normal. Just regular anger. It's not -- it's not like it was before."

 _Before_ , when his anger had been a living thing, seething constantly under the surface, when all he'd wanted was to punch something until it bruised, kick something until it stopped moving, feel bones snapping under his hands, watch blood drip between his fingers.

"You put seven bullets into that shifter," Sam says. 

Dean's fingers twitch around the neck of his beer. "I told you, that was just -- "

"Target practice, right. What about the werewolf? Was _that_ target practice? Because you put seven bullets in her too, and you -- "

"Damn it, Sammy, I -- "

"Dean," Cas says sternly, moving in closer, so close he almost crowds Dean back against the car. He smells like ozone and the tired, sunbaked leather inside the Continental. "Let me see your arm."

Dean hesitates for a second, taking a long swallow of his beer, uncertain in a snakes-in-the-belly way he doesn't really understand, except that the first time Cas had seen the Mark he'd looked and sounded angry and disappointed, but Cas just grabs his wrist and starts impatiently rolling up his sleeve. The Mark looks just like it always does, pinker than the skin around it and thick-rough like a scar; Cas traces the shape of it with the tips of his fingers, and a jolt of arousal rocks through Dean like a lightning bolt. He sucks in a slow breath, bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn't shiver, so he doesn't moan and claw at the front of Cas' coat.

"How did you feel when you killed the shifter?" Cas asks, tightening his grip on Dean's arm when Dean tries to pull away. "Were you angry? Excited? Sexually -- "

"No," Dean says quickly, heat crawling up the back of his neck. That was another shameful thing about _before_ \-- a good fight has always worked him up a little, but back then it had made him hard, had made him want to fuck endlessly, roughly, using his teeth and nails. Back then, he had wanted desperately to fuck Cas, because Cas was juiced up again and Cas could've taken it, could've taken Dean thrusting into him hard and fast, Dean pinning him to the bed by the hips, Dean sucking a dark-red bruise into his throat, right where his pulse thrums under his jaw. "I didn't -- it felt like being on a hunt. You know -- normal."

"What about that vampire?" Sam asks. 

"What about him?" Dean counters. He tries to pull his arm away again, but Cas just tugs it back where he wants it, grunting under his breath with his mouth too close to Dean's jaw. "I cut his head off because I had to. I wasn't -- you know. _Excited_ about it or anything."

"You used your boot knife."

"My boot knife was all I had!" It's not like Dean had wanted it that way, holding the bastard's face against the asphalt while Sam pinned him down by the shoulders, working the blade through skin and muscle until it finally grated against bone. "The next time we get ambushed by a bugfuck-angry vamp, I'll ask it to hold on so I can get my head-chopper out of the trunk."

"You know what, Dean? I -- "

"Are you telling me the truth?" Cas asks, waving Sam off with his free hand. The hand holding Dean's arm inches up a little, until his fingers are curved around Dean's elbow, brushing the bunched-up fabric of Dean's sleeve. "I know you dislike discussions of this type, but it is imperative you tell me the truth."

"Yeah," Dean mutters, taking a swig of his beer. He pulls his arm away again -- successfully this time -- and bends it up to hide the Mark from view. "Look, if I start to feel funky, I'll let you know."

 

+

 

Cas is still there in the morning, and everything is awkward as hell.

He and Sam spend most of the day watching Dean like he's some kind of weird animal at the zoo. Sam at least has the decency to look a little embarrassed about it, but Cas is fucking shameless. He just stares, all wide, blue eyes and an odd twist to the line of his mouth, and it digs at something inside Dean's chest, reminds him of -- _of_.

In Rexford, Cas had opened Dean up while Dean was sprawled out on his front, working his fingers in and out while Dean gasped and clawed at the dingy sheets and rubbed his aching dick against the bed, but he'd rolled Dean over before pushing inside, had fucked Dean sitting up on his knees, Dean's legs spread over his thighs, had said he wanted to see Dean's face. Dean had flushed impossibly hot, a slow heat burning from his cheeks down to the middle of his chest, but Cas had just kept staring at him, had murmured, "No, Dean -- Dean, look at me," the one time Dean had turned his head.

"Jesus Christ," Dean snaps at lunch, close to crawling out of his skin. "You two need to knock it off."

Sam frowns at his salad, but Cas just shrugs, toying with a cup of coffee he probably won't drink.

By late afternoon, Dean is ready to punch them both in the face, but he finds an internet thing about a series of grave desecrations over the Nebraska line in Kearney, so he tells them to meet him in the garage in an hour instead.

 

+

 

Kearney is less than one hundred miles from Lebanon, but they get a pretty late start, and they hit a restless knot of traffic just south of the I-80 interchange. They don't roll into town until a little past six, and at that point the sun has already started to set, the sky a reddish-purple bruise as it stretches above their heads. They don't bother putting on their fed suits and talking to the funeral director; instead, they hop the cemetery's fence after closing time and poke around the mausoleum until something pokes back.

Dean is expecting a ghoul, so he's only half-surprised when Sam cracks the door to a private wing and finds five of them, a whole freaking Addams Family reanimated as three Chinese women who look alike enough to be sisters -- probably were sisters, since they came from the same vault -- and a father and son who'd been buried in Navy whites. The tight space and smooth marble walls amplify all the noise; Dean's ears ring with screams and shouts and the muddle of scrambling footsteps, and then Cas whips out a flash of light that rumbles like an earthquake and flares up so bright Dean sees spots when he closes his eyes.

Cas' laser show takes care of the sisters and the younger sailor; all four of them collapse to the floor with smoke curling out of their eyes and noses and mouths. The older sailor pops up from behind an iron statue of a weeping woman and tries to make a break for it, but he crashes right into Sam and reels backward, stumbling past Dean as he tries to find his feet. 

Dean shoots it right between then eyes, then follows the falling body and shoots it again, and again, keeps shooting until the gun is empty and Cas' hand is curling around his wrist.

 

+

 

"Dean?" 

"Don't, Sammy. Just -- don't."

 

+

 

Three days later, they bump into some demons while buying groceries at the White's in Smith Center.

Cas smites two of them right there in the cereal aisle, his huge hands crushing up underneath their jaws, his mouth creased in irritation as he sears them with holy light, and the other two smoke out and zip toward the front door. Dean and Sam catch them in the parking lot as they're cramming themselves into new meatsuits; Sam kills one with his angel blade, a clean blow right between the shoulders, and Dean kills the other one with Ruby's knife.

He jabs the knife into its gut, dragging it up toward the sternum as the lights crackle and buzz out, then pulls out and stabs it in the side of the neck. The body crumples to the ground, and Dean hunches over it, snarling, plunging the knife in again. His mouth is dry, and a strange white noise is rushing in his ears, and his hands are warm, feel -- 

"Dean."

Cas' voice is sharp enough to cut through the haze; when Dean blinks back to reality, he's breathing hard through the nose and staring Cas right in the face. His hands are sticky, covered in blood.

"I," Dean starts, clearing his throat, "I -- I don't -- "

"I know," Cas says softly. "I know."

 

+

 

"I was telling the truth," Dean insists, his voice too loud for the cold quiet of the war room. He still has blood on his hands; Sam -- who had been furiously silent on the drive home -- had started yelling the second they walked through the door. "I really did feel fine."

"I think you thought you felt fine!"

"What? I -- do you know how ridiculous that sounds?"

"Oh, okay. You want to talk about ridiculous?" Sam demands, anger flushing his cheeks, pink and bright. "How about... watching my brother stab a dead body five times?"

"Damn it, Sammy, I -- "

"Please," Cas cuts in sharply. He slides one hand up to Dean's arm, his thumb digging into the skin just below the Mark, rests the other one on Sam's shoulder. "Arguing will not accomplish anything."

Sam frowns for a second, then heaves out a heavy sigh and says, "Yeah, all right," but Dean jerks his arm away from Cas and storms out of the room.

 

+

 

Dean turns the shower on so hot it makes him hiss, stands under the spray until his skin turns pink and the plumbing rattles and the water starts to run cold.

 

+

 

Dean's clothes are covered in blood, so he heads back to his room wrapped in a towel. He isn't expecting to find Cas waiting for him there, perched on the side of the bed with his coat off and sleeves rolled up to his elbow.

He isn't expecting Cas to kiss him either, to tug him closer by the towel and drag him down to the bed, to push his tongue into Dean's mouth, everything filthy and wet. Dean's skin is still damp, so the blanket clings and pulls at Dean's shoulders when Cas nudges him onto his back, and the material of Cas' slacks rubs rough against his thighs. Cas slides a hand underneath Dean's head, stroking his thumb behind the shell of Dean's ear, leaning down to kiss Dean again, and Dean arches up against him, catching Cas' lip between his teeth as he works on the buttons of Cas' shirt.

Cas sits up long enough to shrug the shirt off and drop it off the side of the bed, and Dean opens Cas' slacks and tugs them down past his hips, smiling at the sound Cas makes when he wraps his hand around Cas' dick. He slides his other hand around the back of Cas' neck, pulling Cas down, wanting to feel Cas on top of him, and Cas kisses him again, tangling their legs together, twisting his fingers into Dean's hair, stroking his hand over Dean's dick. Dean can't get close enough, can't swallow down the noises coming out of his mouth, needy moans and gasps, and Cas' name, over and over and over. 

Cas drags his mouth down the line of Dean's jaw, then leaves it there, open and wet, his lips catching against Dean's skin as he works his hips, as he fucks into Dean's hand. He comes first, the lights flickering a little as he chokes out Dean's name; he takes a second to catch his breath, then slides his hand up the length of Dean's dick, runs his thumb over the head until Dean's thighs start to shake, until he shatters, breathless and scrabbling at the sheets.

 

+

 

They lie together on the bed afterward, just like they had in Rexford, Dean sprawled on his back with his feet tangled in the sheet and Cas curled against Dean's side with his head on Dean's shoulder and his leg hooked over Dean's thigh. Slowly, Dean runs his fingers through Cas' hair.

Just as Dean is starting to doze off, Cas brushes his mouth over Dean's nipple and says, "Will you talk to me now?"

"What?" Dean asks, leaning up on his elbow. He feels cold suddenly, even though the air in the room is still pretty thick. "Is that why you -- "

"No." Cas slides his hand up Dean's side, strokes his thumb over Dean's skin until Dean starts to relax. "I wanted to. I have wanted to."

"Oh," Dean says, something sour and uncertain twisting in his gut. "I didn't know, or I would've -- I didn't think you'd still want to, after you got your groove back." After Dean sent him away, after Dean left him in Idaho. "Angels don't usually -- you know. Feel stuff."

Cas kisses the hollow of Dean's throat, then leans up to mouth at the corner of his jaw. "I used to believe that. Now I think we were told not to feel because we will feel too much if given the choice, and our father wished to save us the trouble."

"Cas."

Cas kisses him, soft and slow, and he runs his hand down Dean's arm, trailing his fingers over the Mark until a sullen heat throbs between Dean's legs. He'd be getting hard again if he was still sixteen; since he's nearly thirty-six, his dick just aches from the sudden rush of blood.

"We do need to talk about this," Cas says carefully.

"Yeah, I -- I know." Dean swallows the knot in the back of his throat, and he stares up at the ceiling, unable to look Cas in the face. "I wasn't lying before. You know, when I said I felt all right. 'Cause I did, right up until that -- until earlier. I know I went overboard with the shifter and the werewolf -- "

"And the ghoul."

"Right, and the ghoul. And I really didn't have a choice about the vamp, but I -- I probably should've been more weirded out about having to saw off its head like that. I just -- I didn't feel anything."

"Nothing at all?"

"No," Dean mutters. Shame burns in his chest, horrible and hot; Sam and Cas wasted all that time trying to fix the mess he made, and now he's back to square one in a little over two months. "Am I -- is it coming back?"

Cas is silent for a long moment, long enough that Dean would think he'd fallen asleep if he was human. Then he sighs quietly and sits up, shifting around until he's cross-legged on the bed at Dean's side, careless of his nudity or the sheet-creases on his shoulder or the dried come on his stomach. Frowning, he pulls Dean's arm into his lap and studies the Mark; he traces the shape of it by touching the skin around it with the tips of his fingers, and that fills Dean with another rush of heat, muted without direct contact but still desperate.

"Cain is the only other person who has carried this burden," he says finally, his voice low, almost cautious. "He carried it for thousands of years, and he spent much of that time either in hell or in hiding."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, not much is certain, but I might -- I think I understand." Cas slides up the bed, turning to sit back against the headboard; he threads his fingers into Dean's hair, strokes his thumb along Dean's hairline. "When the purified blood cleansed your soul of demonic taint, it also created a barrier between your soul and the Mark. I believe that barrier has started to weaken."

"So why didn't I feel anything?"

"The Mark's influence on you was still weak. It could not force you into violent acts, but once you were already shooting or stabbing, it could encourage you to be... excessive."

"So this is it?" Dean asks. He sits up and rubs his hand over his face. "I'm gonna go kill-crazy again?"

Cas presses his hand to the Mark, hard; a jolt of icy-hot grace rocks through Dean so fiercely it rattles behind his teeth, and the Mark flares up, angry and hot, then quiets, curling inward in a way Dean can feel.

"What -- "

"I strengthened the barrier. Hopefully, it will hold long enough for us to find a cure."

Dean clears his throat once, twice. "Cas, just 'cause you got a mojo refill -- you shouldn't, um. You shouldn't waste it on me."

"It isn't a waste," Cas says simply. "Saving you -- saving you is worth all of it."

 

+

 

They say goodbye early in the morning, kissing against the Continental until the sun rises enough to burn off some of the fog. 

"I'm sorry," Cas says, running his thumb over the skin behind Dean's ear. "The angel I've been working with -- she isn't answering her phone. I'm concerned she's found some kind of trouble."

"What was she doing when you split up?"

"She was looking for a rogue angel. Apparently, the angel's vessel once dabbled in some kind of magic."

"Witches?" Dean asks, squeezing Cas' hip. "Me and Sam -- is it anything we can help with?"

"If it is, I'll call you."

Dean takes a deep breath, makes himself say it. "And if it isn't? Will you -- I want you to come back, all right? I want you here."

"Yes," Cas says, smiling. "I'll come home."


End file.
